What’s an ex-President to do?   Edward Heath, Britain’s prime minister from 1970 to 1974, recently announced that he intended to retire from the House of Commons after serving continuously there for fifty years. Heath has been around so long that he’s in the lyric of a Beatles song, yet no one in Britain considered it unusual that he should remain a leading voice in his Conservative party so many years after relinquishing his country’s helm. Such lingering is unheard of these days in the United States, and no doubt the departure of William Jefferson Clinton from the White House—not Read More

One of the saddest things about history is discovering how often one’s idols turn out to have feet of clay. Read More

One standing rule at this column and the rest of American Heritage is to be sure not to focus too much on New York. Read More

The mission now confronting our nation—to transport a large military force to a distant, hostile, Islamic country; hold together a tenuous international coalition; subdue a brazen terrorist network; and put an end to the random slaughter and harassment of American citizens—may seem like an impossible one. Read More

This winter the ongoing battle for control of the Reform party began to strain credulity, not to mention the adage that politics makes strange bedfellows. Read More

There is nothing quite so pathetic as a wizard when he is starting to lose it. See The Wizard of Oz, when the title sorcerer thunders at Dorothy and friends to "Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain!"—i.e., himself. Read More

They swept over the plains at speeds of 100 miles an hour, outracing cars and shorting their ignitions; forcing down planes and stopping trains in their tracks. Read More

Sino-American relations always seem to have at least a hint of the ridiculous about them, and small wonder, since they tend to be more about the images each nation projects upon the other than any objective reality. Witness the last superpower brush-up, which involved the death of a Chinese pilot who seemed most intent upon exchanging e-mails, an unacknowledged hostage crisis, and a non-apology apology from the United States. Read More

Our seemingly interminable presidential campaign is safely behind us now, but I’m not willing to let it go just yet—at least not until I hear an apology from someone about the most egregious smear to emerge from the campaign. Read More

It’s always been the Republicans. The midterm elections have brought us a sweep of both houses of Congress by the Democrats. Just what this means in terms of the war in Iraq or specific legislation is still unknowable, but it now seems undeniable that we are living in an age of radicalism. Republican radicalism, that is. This should come as no surprise to anyone who followed reports of a September Oval Office press conference George W. Bush gave for a group of selected columnists. “I got into politics initially because I wanted to help change a culture,” President Bush asserted, Read More